In today's economy, everyone is concerned about getting the most for their money. I'd like to show you how to do a little comparison shopping when you are ready to have your quilt top turned into a family treasure. Most people in the quilting industry price their service per square inch. It's quick, logical, and fair. An overall pattern will be less expensive per square inch than a custom or heirloom quilting service.

I decided to do some research on quilting prices, because the rates at Candy Apple Quilts have not gone up in a few years now, and I have seen quite a lot of variance across the pricing board. In an effort to glean the most accurate info, I interviewed 17 quilters nationwide, and 3 more who are in my general vicinity, for a total of 20 comparison companies. I intentionally chose quilters with rates starting at 1.5 cents per square inch to see if they were indeed cheaper in the long run. I compiled all of the information into a spreadsheet, and renamed the least expensive quilter "Company X" for our purposes here.

Look at the chart below, and it will be easy for you to follow along with the logic.

Price comparison

When pricing your quilting service, you need to ask questions about extra charges. Each of the 20 companies that I interviewed had extra charges for various services, including the edge treatments, the threads chosen, and set-up and turning fees. As you can see from the chart above, I have listed a few of these fees so you could get an idea of how much they typically run. While looking at the rows titled "Set-up fee" and "Edge-trimming fee", notice that these charges are not in the Candy Apple Quilts pricing structure. In my way of thinking, asking for a set-up fee is comparable to a mechanic charging you to pull your car into the garage so he can work on it! You will never see a set-up fee here. As for the treatment of the edges of your quilt.... that's another area where I firmly stand my ground.

When you receive your quilted project, you want to be able to get your binding on RIGHT NOW --- right? The last thing you need to deal with is sloppy basting stitches, or even worse -- an overall pattern that runs off the edges of your quilt and into the "batting no-man's-land". It can ruin the quilting design along the edges of your quilt, and it can also make it harder for you to attach your own binding. All of the edges done by Candy Apple Quilts are machine-sewn with a regular stitch length (not basted) just inside of the binding line, making it easy for you to have a guide-line to follow when attaching binding. All excess batting is trimmed away cleanly and evenly. You know how hard it can be to do that trimming if you don't have a quilt-sized table to work on! Your quilts are returned to you "ready to go" --- you just sit down and bind. Or, we can do that too!

Back to the chart above.... lots of folks work through their local quilt shop, and some quilt shops take a portion of the final price, or a "cut" of twenty to thirty percent that gets added on top. Ouch! You will never find that at Candy Apple Quilts, either! The example uses a hypothetical quilt that is 45 inches square, and shows the pricing for an overall design at 2 cents for Candy Apple Quilts versus 1.5 cents for Company X. You can easily see by the total at the bottom of each column that cheaper is not always.... well ..... cheaper!

Click here for a complete pricing schedule, including sample pictures of each quilting type!